


Letters from the Swamp

by justalittlegreen



Series: Sunshine and Filth [2]
Category: MASH (1970), MASH (TV)
Genre: Longing, The Swamp, the obligatory letters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-09 22:09:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16457933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justalittlegreen/pseuds/justalittlegreen
Summary: The fine art of longing.





	Letters from the Swamp

The letters come in clusters, sometimes four in a day, then none for nearly a week. She savors them, even sniffs the paper, hoping – what? For a glimpse of him? – to feel near him, to bring herself an iota closer. She reads them so often that pieces of them lodge in her brain, like a song she can’t stop hearing.

_My darling Peg – I’ve gotten settled, so to speak. My introduction to Korea was like landing on an alien planet full of fear and disbelief. I did get put to use right away; they weren’t kidding when they said they needed more doctors. It’s hard to believe I was in your arms only three nights ago; I miss you as if I haven’t seen you for a year._

_Dearest Peggy – They call our tent The Swamp, and with good reason. You’d shudder to even get near it._

_My lovely one – There are nights when the moon is high and bright and the hills around us look almost welcome, and the camp is almost quiet, and I am almost, for a minute, not completely miserable._

He has always used poetry to distract her from himself. When they were in high school, he brought her seventeen love poems – Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman – before he could utter the words on his own. The letters he wrote her from basic training were mostly limericks about the quirks of his colleagues. Here, in Korea, he settles for his own words, without books to turn to, but rarely tells her what’s actually on his mind.

She writes to him every night, at the table, imagining him imagining her sitting in her robe (the terrycloth, which still feels like him, like home.) She focuses on Erin, the house, the neighborhood. She wants him to feel connected, to feel the tether between them, between him and his real life, the one waiting for him.

It’s not unusual for him to spend whole letters describing his tentmates, and the other doctors in the O.R. She starts to feel like she’s getting to know them, too, after a while. He records snippets of conversations and drops them into the letters.  
  
_You like your ice cream all mushy?_  
_The mushier the better._  
_You like Chinese food? You like to walk in the rain?_  
_Y-yes, sir._  
_You could’ve been my wife._  
_Yes, sir._  
  
Radar, she thinks. No one else he’s described is so timid he’d write an actual stutter into the script. She smiles to herself at the thought of her coming up in his everyday conversations.

But it’s Hawkeye Pierce, the man who brought him in to the war, the wise-cracking surgeon of unmatched talent whose quips she most prizes and when BJ – who, despite being generous in all ways, does have a fair amount of pride when it comes to his surgical skills – admits that Pierce is his league, Peg knows it means something. She likes knowing there’s someone there for him to talk with at the end of the day. A buddy. Who sounds like a decent man, aside from what BJ describes as “a necessary degree of alcoholism.”

Mindful of the censors (and, Peg presumes, nosy bunkmates), Peg and BJ’s letters never get steamier than the occasional reference – _I hold you in my thoughts as closely as I did the night before I left, my love_ – but when Peg hungers for him – and lord, does she – she buries her face in the pajamas she never washed and remembers that night. How he smelled. The fine sheen of sweat on that bronze skin. The way he fit inside her – Peg wonders how long it will be before she feels that fullness again. That sense of connectedness. Wholeness. Home.


End file.
